The secret of it all seems to be that the crowd pushes, but no one person pushes, so that there is no one to get angry with. Unless perhaps it is a foreigner like myself, who was made to feel mortally ashamed once when I lost my temper and lashed out back, sides, and front at my neighbours to get some breathing-space. “To have to travel with such people!” they said with indignant scorn.9
“Such people” means in this case a Britisher who was not so accepting of abuse, not so masochistic as Russians are.
The individual’s insignificance also becomes apparent in attempts to obtain the most rudimentary goods and services in Russia. I recall how I approached a restaurant along Moscow’s Arbat on a day in September of 1991. It was dinnertime, and I was hungry. But on the door was posted the following notice: “CLOSED FOR DINNER.” A few restaurant workers were eating inside of the mostly empty restaurant.
Even workers in the recently formed cooperative restaurants often behave as if they do not know what is good for them. In one instance I waited forty-five minutes just to order a meal. The waiter was surly, and the food turned out to be mediocre. Naturally I left a one kopeck tip. But I am not a Russian.
There are anecdotes galore on this topic in Hedrick Smith’s book The New Russians and in other accounts by Westerners.10 Even Russians have written about the problem, which is to say that certainly not all Russians find that abuse of the individual by the “system” is acceptable. An example is Vladimir Voinovich’s Anti-Soviet Soviet Union (1985), a compendium of painful, satirical essays the very title of which suggests a collective kind of masochism.
Sticking One’s Neck Out in the Collective
I am hardly the first to notice the masochistic tinge to Russian collectivism. Jeffry Klugman says, for example, that Soviet Russians grew up in families and went to schools which fostered “the total warmth of submissive belonging.”11 Earlier in this century Berdiaev wrote that “the Russian people has a public gift of submissiveness, of smirenie of the person to the collective.”12 Writing in 1898, A. Nikol’skii asserted that “in the overall social life of the peasantry, the personal element is sacrificed to the communal element.”13 Nikol’skii makes it clear that such sacrifice is unnecessary and excessive, that is, masochistic in nature. He refers to the “passivity” and “profound quietism” of the communal peasant, and he expresses admiration for the enterprising peasant who acts out of self-interest, or who moves away to the city and thereby casts off the “yoke of communal life.”14
To take an example from the immediate post-Soviet period, we have Bulat Okudzhava talking about the collective talent of Russians to accomplish great deeds, but only when under threat of the stick (“iz-pod palki”). Emerging from their “recent enslavement,” Russians are still plagued by their tendency to submit unnecessarily to the collective: “Our misfortune resides in the fact that we are all one society [vse my odno obshchestvo] with a poorly developed ability to think independently, an enviable capability for submission [podchiniat’sia], and an inability to take individual risks or responsibility.”15
When someone does take individual risk or initiative, the collective (or a representative of the collective) is likely to express disapproval and, more important for the theme of this book, the individual is likely to give in. In 1991 Moscow psychoanalyst Vera Loseva related an anecdote to me which graphically captures this situation:
Two beggars are sitting on a street corner. A third beggar arrives, sits down, and starts playing the harmonica. One of the other beggars gets up, comes over to the harmonica player and starts hitting him on the head, saying: “You can’t do that, you have to beg the same way the rest of us beggars do!” The would-be musician puts away his harmonica and apologizes profusely.
The beggar who strikes the harmonica player is enforcing the sadistic will of the collective (however small, in this case a grand total of three beggars). The beggar who complies, on the other hand, is a moral masochist. He willingly accepts the harm done to him, that is, he accedes to both the blows and the reduction of his efficiency as a beggar.
If in America the inventor of a better mousetrap is rewarded, in Russia the more efficient beggar is punished.
Of course the harmonica player could resist, and this might bring even more punishment. So hasn’t he chosen the less masochistic solution by complying? Perhaps yes in the short run, but that does not make his original solution non-masochistic. And besides, without a masochistic mind-set he (and others in his position) might think of ways of resisting the pressures of the collective, such as striking back at the other beggars, avoiding streetcorners where other beggars are present, or hiring beggars as bodyguards with the profits made from begging by harmonica.
But, “don’t stick out!” (“Ne vysovyvaites’!”), says the proverb. The tallest blade of grass, after all, is the one to get cut down. Hedrick Smith points to the masochistic essence of this attitude toward the collective: “The Russians are long-suffering people who can bear the pain of their misery, so long as they see that others are sharing it. The collective jealousy can be fierce against those who rise above the crowd.”16 In other words, masochistic conformity can have a sadistic side-effect. Among Smith’s numerous examples of this mentality are the following:
Valentin Berezhkov, a former Soviet diplomat, told me of a farmer he knew in a town outside of Moscow whose horse and few cows were set free and whose barn was set afire by neighboring farm workers who were jealous of his modest prosperity. The Soviet press is full of stories about attacks on privately owned cooperative restaurants and other small service shops, the perpetrators people who resent seeing others do well. In the debates at the Supreme Soviet, the most potent arguments, the ones with the strongest resonance among the populace, are the passionate accusations that the free market will yield speculators getting rich from profiteering and exploiting the working class.17
In an article that appeared in a 1992 issue of Literaturnaia gazeta, N. Zenova refuses to name the location of collective farm property taken over by an enterprising group of people for semi-private development. The reason is clear: some envious readers might do physical harm to the developers.18
If in America misery loves company, in Russia misery often requires company. In effect: “If I am going to live poorly, let them live poorly too.”19 Any attempt to improve oneself will meet with resistance. To quote a saying that was widely applied in late Soviet Russia: “Sobaka na sene” (“A dog [lying] on the hay”). Even if a dog has no use for hay, it will not let anyone else get at it.20
The members of the collective all have to be equally miserable—otherwise it becomes too obvious that one’s own personal misery is not really necessary, that is, is masochistic in essence. The happy non-masochist is quite correctly perceived as alien (“chuzhoi”), not part of “us” (“svoi”) any more.21
Not all members of the collective will necessarily feel hostile toward another’s success, indeed in most cases not even the majority will necessarily feel this way. But the spiteful proportion of the population is nonetheless significant, as recent sociological surveys have shown. For example, when a jewelry cooperative in a town in the Crimea was closed down because the authorities thought the workers there were making too much money, an opinion poll showed that 30 percent of the public agreed with the closure (14 percent thought the closure was not in the spirit of glasnost, and 56 percent thought it was wrong).22